According to a National Park Service news release, the 42-year-old Belgian tourist was taking a short walk Saturday in the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes in 123-degree heat when he either broke or lost his flip-flops, putting his feet into direct contact with the desert ground. The result: third-degree burns.
“The skin was melted off his foot,” said Death Valley National Park Service Ranger Gia Ponce. “The ground can be much hotter — 170, 180 [degrees]. Sometimes up into the 200 range.”
Unable to get out on his own and in extreme pain, the man and his family recruited other park visitors to help; together, the group carried him to the sand dunes parking lot, where park rangers assessed his injuries.
Though they wanted a helicopter to fly him out, helicopters can’t generate enough lift to fly in the heat-thinned air over the hottest parts of Death Valley, officials said. So park rangers summoned an ambulance that took him to higher ground, where it was a cooler 109 degrees and he could then be flown out.
Maybe don’t even go to a place called “Death Valley.”
Eh, I don’t think that’s really fair.
It is a national park, and it’s huge, something like 5000 square miles of desert.
I could see the appeal for someone who has never seen a desert to want to go and see a huge desert for the first time. I could even see why they’d pick that desert: cool name, cool history, lots of beautiful mountains. I can also see why a lot of foreign people would get a false sense of security, it’s called a park, it’s in a well developed country, and it’s “maintained” by its own government agency, so surely things can’t go too wrong out there.
I’ve travelled all over the US, and have been to a lot of national parks. I always do my research about the area, get printed maps, carry a gps, and generally follow all the rules you’re supposed to. But those are American rules because this is kind of a unique country in that you can drive from a city that has everything you need to live into true wilderness where there might not be another human or even a way to contact anyone for miles, in a matter of hours. Most developed countries are not like that. So for someone who’s come from a country like Germany, or really anywhere in Europe, it really would be a culture shock to realize that there are huge sections of this country where you are on your own.
I don’t blame people for wanting to come here and see our beautiful national parks. But the amount of people I’ve seen who either don’t carry water, or just carry a small bottle from a vending machine, is insane. And I doubt those people tell anyone what their route is, or what to do if they don’t show up at a specific time.
These Germans really made some simple mistakes that any average person could, and didn’t have the education on wilderness to truly recognize they had wound up in a fight for their life. I’ve seen it happen before even in small state parks.